Pastor keeps priorities in face of illness

Without warning during a summer vacation with his family, Gardendale’s First Baptist Church pastor Steve Gaines began to experience double vision. Both eyelids began to droop and one eyelid soon closed completely. At home a neurologist stunned the Gaines family with the news that his condition was myasthenia gravis, a form of muscular dystrophy which affects about 30,000 people in the United States.
   
“The CAT scan showed,” Gaines explained, “that my thymus gland was much larger than most adults and that it contained a tumor about the size of an orange. On Aug. 7 I underwent surgery to remove the gland and tumor. The procedure was rough; the sternum is severed much like in open-heart surgery.” A biopsy showed the tumor to be non-malignant. The presence of a thymus tumor occurs in about one-fifth of myasthenia gravis sufferers. When these patients undergo removal of the thymus and related tumor, symptoms dissipate within six months to a year in most cases. In those who have the enlarged thymus but no tumor, medications are usually needed throughout their lifetime.
   
“I never thought I’d be thankful for a tumor,” Gaines said.
   
“When my doctor called me on my cell phone and told me I had the tumor, my wife, Donna, and I were out shopping,” Gaines said. “We went outside the store and cried. I said, ‘I just want to see (our son) Grant play football this year.’ This was his senior year. And I saw every game. I had one eye open, but I was at every game,” he noted.
   
“My eye stayed shut for almost five months and on Thanksgiving Day it opened,” Gaines said.
   
Reflecting back, he said, “The day before I preached at the Southern Baptist Convention’s Pastors Conference my dad died. One month later I’m told that I have muscular dystrophy.
   
“But through this God has led me to preach on walking by faith, not by sight,” he said. “God certainly didn’t cause me to have the tumor, but He allowed it so I could realize that no matter what I face He is with me. And I’d said this before, Job 42:5: ‘I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now my eye sees thee.’ But now I’ve experienced it for myself.
   
“God has used all this to teach me so many things,” Gaines said. ”And I believe Donna and I have both had our faith greatly expanded by all this. God is in the healing business. I believe He still heals today. He’s ‘the same yesterday and today and forever’(Heb. 13:8) and He sometimes uses doctors, medicine and all that. But He goes beyond what man can do.
   
“So we prayed for healing,” Gaines said. “You know, sometimes He heals immediately and sometimes He allows time to pass — either way He’s a healing God. Even when He allows a Christian to die, that’s ultimate healing not in this world, but with the Lord.
   
“God has three answers He can give you when you pray: yes, no or wait. Mine has been a wait, and now the manifestation has come. I knew God was going to open my eye I just didn’t know when.”
   
During his absence from the pulpit, Gaines said, “The church continued to grow. We bought additional land, we built parking, our staff did all the preaching — David Jett, Mark Harrison, Bill Street and Nelson Hannah.”
   
Since the church’s services are broadcast by television the response from viewers was tremendous. “I had a lot of pastors lifting me up and their churches praying for me, and I’d like to let them know how much I love them and appreciate them. I had so much support from my church family and from all over.”
   
Gaines said his experience has made him more compassionate when people are hurting and has taught him to slow down in life. “It’s made me realize that a lot of what I do as a ‘busy pastor’ is not necessary. I’ve learned to slow down. I focus more on praying and simply on loving people,” he said.